Pretec ships 'world's most capacious' SD card

Pretec will next month begin mass production of what the company claims is the world's first 4GB SD card.

But anyone looking to load up their digital camera, PDA or music player with a memory card offering an HDD-sized storage capacity is going to find they don't come cheap.

The 4GB SD card provides data access speed of 20MBps, making it the world's fastest card compatible with the SD 1.1 specification, Pretec said. SD 1.1-supporting devices are few and far between, but the Pretec card will work with SD 1.0 devices, but the read performance will drop down to the standard 10MBps.

The card is produced using two 16Gb SLC NAND Flash chips, both fabbed at 65nm.

Pretec also introduced today a 2GB memory card based on the MultiMedia Card 4 specification, aka MMC Plus. Again, MMC 4-supporting devices are extremely rare, but Pretec said it was confident enough devices are currently being designed with the new spec in mind.

The MMC 4 part provides data transfer rates of up to double that of the SD 1.1 card. Pretec didn't say how much it's asking for the 2GB MMC 4 card, but the 4GB SD card, which is sampling now ahead of mass production next month, currently costs $699 a pop. ®